On November 3, 1992, Coloradans went to the polls. They gave Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton all eight of the state’s electoral votes; 53.4 percent of them also ticked yes on Amendment 2, agreeing to deny gays and lesbians any and all legal protection by the government of their state, forever.

The majority opinion, written by Judge Vito Titone, established new criteria—along the lines Rubenstein suggested—for determining what a family is.

Attorney General Gale Norton appealed to the Colorado State Supreme Court to get the injunction lifted. (The issue was so heated that the proceedings were broadcast live on Court TV.)78 That august body backed Judge Bayless: Amendment 2 was dubious, the judges said. “Fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote,” one judge argued. Amendment 2

“Sorry, it’s the wrong time in the movement to bring up a case like this,” a Lambda lawyer told her.

He pointed to each of the speakers on the dais, saying, “I’d be honored, honored, honored, honored, honored, to serve with any of you guys.”45

Frank Kameny’s observation bears repeating: “We started with nothing, and look what we have wrought!”

The PR person for Latinos pro Derechos Humanos, Manolo Gomez, who’d arranged the radio “debate,” was beaten and left for dead in an alley. His car was firebombed. He was also fired from his job as an editor for the Spanish-language edition of Cosmopolitan magazine because he’d made public declarations about his homosexuality.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the majority opinion on Romer v. Evans, declared that the amendment was inexplicable of anything but animosity to a class of people. It was both too narrow and too broad. It identified a person by a single trait, and then it denied that person protection across the board. “Amendment 2 classifies homosexuals not to f

precipitous: